Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
 

This is just a strange situation. The plane disappeared from radar on Saturday, and there has been no trace of the plane since then. No wreckage has been found, and apparently none of the locator beacons are transmitting.

I read this book, Balky Bartockomus is the bad guy.

In all seriousness, prayers for all involved, can't imagine having a loved one up there.

I'm nervewracked a little myself. I fly to Beijing on Saturday on the same type of plane, though with United.

I'm more concerned that this is also due to the Chinese Separatists who did the mass stabbing in Kunming. I am traveling to the Yunnan province which is Kunming's capital. I'm slightly concerned with the United flight, but moreso because we'll be taking a plane from Beijing to either Dali or Kunming.

Two weeks later I'll be flying out of Shanghai to SanFran, but needless to say I'm more nervous than usual. (I hate flying regardless).

My mother however is going to be a wreck as:

I'll be flying out of DC to Beijing (United)
My wife and 2 year old will be flying from Newark to Seattle (Alaskan)
My daughter will be flying from Philly to Dallas Ft. Worth (American)

All on the same day.

I'm still wondering how the hell an entire plane vanished in this day and age, with all the tracking available.

On the terrorism front, if that were the case wouldn't someone be taking credit by now? Isn't that a fundamental part of a terrorist act? At least that's how I define it.

I think the terrorism angle is being fueled largely by the fact that at least two passengers were flying on stolen passports and that those two individuals booked their tickets together. But, yes, your point is a good one.

I can only conclude that if it was say Chinese separatists who contact a government agency in China, or the press and it's being suppressed by said government.

I agree it's totally bizarre. The conclusion is probably even nerve-wracking, that the crew much like Air France, created a situation that they could not recover from.

The whole transponder thing gets me but then I realize it's Malaysian Air we're talking about.

how long will you be in DC for?

Just overnight, I go down to Arlington once a month for school...though I'm graduating in May if I'm lucky.

One of the Malaysian authorities said the footage of the two men that used the stolen passports showed that they were, "not Asian looking" men. If correct that would likely rule out separatists, right?

Very strange all around. It's like the opening scenario of a Bond film.

Uyghur people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

These are the the group that attacked in the train station, they are very euro-centric looking for the most part.

I wonder how often that happens. Is this one of those things that happens "all the time" but we never hear about or is this rare

SI

Evidently it is pretty common.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: Stolen passports market big in Thailand - CSMonitor.com

edit: I just find it hard to believe that there is a way to track stolen passports, and the list is rarely referenced.

Any thought that it might have been shot down intentionally or unintentionally by one of the militaries? It was about to enter Vietnamese air space and off course when "contact was lost", there were multiple people on board with stolen passports...

If it were, there likely would have been a large debris field.

It's looking more and more like this may become an unsolved mystery. "What ever happened to..." Conspiracy theories may commence.

It's only been a couple days, I doubt this won't be figured out.

And I'm sure conspiracy theories have already commenced.

Or an ABC Tv series

I think your reference may be Lost on some people.

+1 to Kodos and Alan T for getting to the Lost reference before I could

Nice on the comments, not so nice on the situation.

Here's a pretty awesome aviation site I wasn't aware of. It does real-time tracking of almost every flight around the world.

Flightradar24.com - Live flight tracker!

The co-founder of the site has been interviewed quite a bit regarding this incident.

Malaysia Airlines Flight Goes Missing En Route to China - Flight MH370

The drive to the airport is much more dangerous. These are always scary, but it is incredibly rare.

flightaware is the one I use - you can not only see flights that are currently in the air but those in the past as well (great for checking out your own flights, after the fact).

Yeah, I'm a big fan of flightaware

SI

The simplest explanation might be pilot suicide. Like the Egypt Air crash from few years ago. Point it to the ocean and dive in. I think it would disappear pretty quickly. I don't know anything but it's simple.

I thought they were still trying to find the debris field.

Is it usual for one of the flight crew to leave the cabin that soon into the flight though? That definitely fits given there's no warning or apparent issue with the plane at all.

I also wonder, given the (at least) two people we know were on the flight with fake passports, and the seemingly completely lax attitude of security at the departure airport, and the fact that the plane just disappeared off radar with no warning or indication anything was wrong whether it's possible to get a bomb onto a plane that completely obliterates the thing to the point that there might not be that much wreckage to look for. Still defeats the point I suppose that nobody has claimed it yet, and even if the Chinese were keeping it quiet surely it would have got out through other channels by now.

I'm no expert on oil slicks, but, my thinking is: If the plane exploded in air at cruising altitude, how could there be an oil slick? I would imagine that the fuel and oil would be too dispersed to create an oil slick. Now if the plane hit the water intact (or mostly intact), that makes much more sense to me as to why there would be an oil slick.

EDIT: The slick is probably more due to hydraulic fluid than oil. Oil slick just seems to be the common term.

If the plane exploded at altitude, you're correct, there likely wouldn't be a slick.

In this case the "oil" would be the jet fuel -- thousands of gallons worth.

Yes, jet fuel would be far more accurate, thank you. Especially since it wasn't too far into its journey.

Two hours into the flight would be a pretty reasonable potty break time for the pilots. This flight only had the 2 pilots, as it was less than 8 hours. There was no need for a relief pilot.

It thought I had heard that the oil slicks that they had found were not related to the plane at all. The oil didn't match what they would have expected to find.

Oh the conspiracy theories are certainly there. I won't even post the web side that this came from cause it doesn't deserve the attention. I couldn't keep a straight face while reading it though.

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It is strange that they are apparently now focusing the search in an area pretty far west of the last known radar location.

Yeah, that struck me as very interesting as well. They must know something that the rest of the world doesn't yet.

Flew Malaysian Airlines from Kuala Lumpur in November (a much shorter flight, to Penang; not to Beijing). Didn't notice anything peculiar securitywise. Granted, I did have a valid non-stolen passport.

A commercial satellite company has snapped pics of the South China Sea/Gulf of Thailand area and has opened up the pics for crowdsourcing.

Tomnod

edit: looks like their servers might be getting hammered at the moment

"If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence."

Flawless logic.

Could someone please ping Amelia Earhart?

Apparently their celphones were ringing as of yesterday.

Strange: Cell Phones of Some Passengers of Missing Flight MH370 Rings, But No One Answers | Kicker Daily News

I think, whoever was calling those numbers heard a 'ring', not that the passengers phones were actually really ringing. If I turn my cell phone off, if someone calls my number, they will hear still a 'ring'.

Hopefully it wasn't the Kaiju entering our dimension.

If this turns out to be some weird Godzilla tie in, I will be outraged.

Lost, schmost. I saw a documentary on this that predates Lost.

SI

Ya, I'm not sure what they expected. "I'm sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed because this phone is currently at the bottom of the ocean."

And I'm pretty sure if they were active the would have tried tracking those phones to see if they were still hitting some towers.

Read rumors of this yesterday -- first I've seen it mentioned in the press:

Malaysian Airlines mystery: Military says missing jet changed course - CBS News

Could a pilot do anything to make the plane more difficult to track during a flight and more difficult to find wreckage of after a crash? Like if he just wanted himself and the plane to "vanish"?

Plenty of things a pilot could do to make the plane more difficult to track. As has been mentioned, most all of the communications that planes make are radio based. So simply turning off the radios turns makes tracking more difficult. Evidently this plane also had ACARS, which is a system that automatically sends data back to home base via radio or satellite link. ACARS was on the big reasons they were able to locate the Air France flight from a few years back in a relatively short period of time in the middle of the Atlantic.

Also, if the pilot was skilled enough, once they turned off any transmitting devices, they could fly low to try and evade surface radar. But from what info the Malaysian military has released, the plane was still flying at a normal cruising altitude when they lost track of it west of the country.

edit: another military source said it was flying low at the time, so who knows